Australia's Boeings to stay in the air

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Qantas spokesman Simon Rushton said it was too early to
speculate on the cause of the accident and Boeing's advice was that
carriers did not need to take any action yet.

Based on a passenger's last words as he was calling a relative
on a mobile phone, the pilots had collapsed from oxygen. This is
normally caused when the cabin is depressurised.

Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman Peter Gibson said an
investigation into the incident would determine whether there was
any need to look at Australia's Boeings.

The Helios Airways plane that crashed into hills north of Athens
was a Boeing 737 300, an older model. Qantas has only 11 of this
model among its fleet of 58 Boeings. It also has 21 craft of the
737 400 model, which is almost identical to the 300, according to a
Boeing spokesman.

Virgin does not operate either model.

Mr Gibson said that it was too early to draw comparisons between
the weekend's Greek crash and any other depressurisation incidents,
including a plane that crashed while flying from Perth to Leonora
in 2000.

But he said the Greek incident was unlikely to be just a simple
case of the pilot's cabin depressurising.

"From time to time, depressurisation happens but that shouldn't
lead to a catastrophe," Mr Gibson said.

He said that normally when depressurisation occurred, oxygen
masks would fall automatically and the pilots would lower the
aircraft to 8000 feet, a level at which they would not be affected
by hypoxia, or lack of oxygen.

Hypoxia can affect a person's ability to think clearly and
rationally within seconds. The person quickly loses consciousness
and dies.

But Mr Gibson said early reports from the Greek accident
indicated that oxygen masks had not dropped.